Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Brenda
and Frances, thank you for taking time to answer our questions and for your
work, which provides a way out of our “consensual mass hallucination that’s
mistakenly referred to as ‘reality’” (Rob Breszny). These questions arise from
conversations we’ve had together about your work and about your latest books—Brenda:
Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan,
2013); and Frances: Anarch. (Futurepoem,
2012) and The Phonemes (Les Figues
Press, 2012).

By
immersing ourselves in your work, we have come to feel grounded in the
irreducible and thus our hope is that these questions will help to further
differentiate each of your thoughts and feelings about “ecopoetics” without
imposing a need to explicate the diversity of the field via the singularity of
definition.

—Sheila
Davies Sumner & Casey McAlduff

NOTE:
We would also like to thank Evelyn Reilly, whose poetry, thoughts and opinions helped
inform the trajectory of this conversation. Her presence is throughout.

On The Imagination—

Sheila Davies Sumner & Casey McAlduff:In our readings and discussions of your work, we came to understand it
as originating from the imagination and the belief that the imagination—because
it doesn’t belong to ‘us’ but rather to a collective unconscious of all life—
allows us to access a post-human-centered consciousness.This breakthrough into the beyond-human
has led us as readers to the beautifully shattering confrontation with our
“species-position” (Reilly) and to embrace a “sensibility that doesn’t consider
the human as somehow the keeper or steward of something that was given to us”
(Hillman, from Angela Hume’s “Imagining Ecopoetics”).

With
these realizations (anti-hallucinations?) also comes the acknowledgement of our
pervasive complacency and the artistic “imperative to work against the grain of
what is complacently or autocratically given,” in order to “form a center of
fierce desire—to refuse false choices” (Frances Richard, from a conversation with Anne Waldman, BOMB).

These
statements seem founded in a kind of personal coming-to; they point toward a
time over which you each came to recognize that we have been terribly wrong.

Can
you talk more about this moment or shift in your own consciousness and how it
affects your daily life?

Brenda Hillman:Maybe most people are
drawn to poetry by moments brought about by intense experiences — things that
take you beyond the limitations of consciousness to an “other” or group of
“others” or to a mysterious thing you wish to define; these experiences have
seemed humbling and are often accompanied by the realization that one just has
no access to experiences these “others” have—whether those others are humans,
fish, imagined tribes, rocks, books, the dead or molecules. Maybe it is the
conviction that we are, if we are ego-bound and impose our will on others, just
much more terribly limited.When
we are tiny children we try so hard to feel we exist and are not threatened by
everyone who comes along and many humans don’t leave that stage… But what does
it mean to realize we are everything and yet cannot know anything beyond our
own skin with any certainty?Nobody has complete access to another’s experience—we go there with a
kind of hopeful empathy or projective imagination, and even then, we are
profoundly limited. i was just out for a pathetically slow run along a busy
road and i saw a squirrel that had just been struck—it had just died and the
blood coming out of its neck seemed unearthly beyond magenta—not even red but
almost glowing toward pink, a color nearly outside the concept of red, and
really shocking. i had no idea what the squirrel’s experience was. i had just
been studying Olson’s “The Kingfishers” for my Ecopoetics class and realized
the squirrel’s and Olson’s experiences were inaccessible but at least Olson has
words.

Frances Richard:I never had a breakthrough moment when I stopped
thinking that we (humans? Americans? English speakers? post-industrial
global-networked capitalist-realist polluters?) were right, and understood
instead that we are wrong. I never thought “we” were “right.” Last night,
before the reading, I was talking with Brenda, Evelyn (Reilly), and Angie Hume
about language and self-consciousness as human adaptations… Compared to
adaptations that allow other creatures to read and respond to their environments
and one another, humans are comically under-equipped. No echolocation like bats
and whales; no internal magnetic compass like foxes and dogs; no inner
electricity like rays and eels; no scent/dance math like ants and bees; no
stamina compared to hummingbird or polar bear; no adaptability to drought and
fire like succulents and redwoods. Certainly no perdurability like rocks; no
scope like oceans. Etc. etc. etc. What evolution cooked up for humans is the reflexive,
symbol-making mind. It’s very cool. But elephants’ minds also appear to be—insofar
as we can know them, which is not well—incredibly impressive, and if “mind” is
the wrong term for the nimbus of possibility generated by and between the brains
of shrews, chameleons, bower birds, dung beetles, doesn’t this make “mind” a
human-solipsistic term? We don’t understand even ourselves well. We act racist
and jingoistic and fundamentalist, violent and selfish and foolish with catastrophic
frequency. We’re stuck in language, stuck in the human perceptual apparatus,
stuck, currently, in the 21st century. We damage each other, and we
damage the mind-boggling array of energy-forms and matter-forms existing with
us. Mind so boggled can’t be all that great.

This
affects my daily life in that…. I try to write and teach from this perspective.
I turn to the art I like best for help in thinking/feeling my way through it. I am often baffled, afraid, angry;
overwhelmed by it; slightly less
often but still often suffused by a mundane, proprioceptive, minorly ecstatic awe.
I try to understand what ethical behavior is, and to behave accordingly. This
feels dumb to write in discursive prose. I am reading a biography of
Wittgenstein, who insisted that ethics could not be said, only shown, and
also (enigmatically, maybe kind of infuriatingly) at least once turned his back
and read Rabindranath Tagore out loud instead of lecturing on logic. Poetry is
useful because to de-center our own minds is an irrational process, a chain of
holes. It requires aporetic tools.

(While
writing this, tutelary friends—liked, followed—have been hovering my thoughts:
Eileen Myles, and ability-courage to call out cant =great word= and social
abusiveness. Alice Notley, and embrace of vatic rage. Dana Ward, writing about
his baby daughter. If a cyborg Eileen-Alice-Dana-insect-rock-fox wrote this, it
would be better.)

SDS & CM:Can you also talk about
how the imagination can lead us ethically and how, as innovation becomes
corporatized, we can continue to distinguish between imaginative acts that
further a post-human consciousness in a creative rather than a destructive way
[fracking, for example]? How does your poetic work incorporate both forces?

Imagination
is not good or bad in itself. In fact, i’m not even sure,
as a concept, “imagination” makes the earth better—we have no way of knowing
what would have happened had we not had The Tempest, Picasso or Tu Fu or…the
“bad imagination”— the atomic bomb...As the concept of imagination applies to
art, we just want it to be boundless and unfettered.It’s inevitable that when you start falling in love with an
art like poetry, it feels good to allow for a somewhat anarchic zone. It’s
rarely useful. When i think about values i’ve gotten from the practice of poetry,
however, there are several things that certainly don’t hurt daily life: being
able to put oneself outside the limits is one thing; being able to bear
uncertainty and be flexible in a state of doubt is another. Extrapolating from
the squirrel moment to all other moments i don’t understand, it is very hard to
know how to behave ethically, what to do or not to do in relation to other
species except to assume a zone of unknowing another. Most theories we are
supposed to live by are ultimately unsatisfying, and i have become increasingly
reliant on intuition, as Shelley says, better that poets remain ‘unacknowledged
legislators.’ i tend to react unpredictably when things are not going well
around me and i learned under stress as an activist in the last decade that i
didn’t really know what i would do in the next moment; if students are being
beaten, i forget what i said i was supposed not to do. In any case, imagination is a strange word that comes
with a lot of baggage. There is something like a postmodern soul concept that
seems capable of distributing reality among plants, animals and even cops at a
protest. When i say soul i don’t mean the floaty filmy thing.i mean that whether you are acting in a
political situation or a purely poetic one, you act as if something in your
experience could reflect a process without a center, could make meaning of that
process even as it is going on. There is something about the intricacy and
intimacy of those moments that is done by what used to be called the soul, and
it’s all right to say that takes place in people. It is very tied with
imagination and if you are trying to make meaning in relation to an other you
know it is not ok to plot to bomb them or spray them.

Since
most kinds of knowledge of spiritual and physical properties—sounds, sights— we
will never have in this lifetime, we must imagine them. Poetry is one way of
getting there.

Frances Richard: Itried above, imperfectly,
to speak to “how the imagination can lead us ethically” (or how my own and other
poets’ imaginations sometimes lead me ethically). How can the poem be used
reflexively to think through the relations of, say, fracking to itself, the
poem?

Q:
How can interplay of

a)
radically dispersed consciousness

b)
semiotic/lexical structures

c)
lyric introspection and awkward passionateness

d)
absurdity

e)
interdependent co-arising with the nonhuman and nonlinguistic

f)
active engagement of history and
lineage

g)
good-faith attempts to respond to technopolitics

x)
x-factor

get
into the poem without hysterically over-burdening the weird, fragile, protean
thing a poem is?

SDS & CM:And lastly, how do you
enact imagination on the page? (We’re thinking of Stevens & Creeley here,
and the poem as an enactment of the mind.)

Frances Richard:Layout and negative page-space—lexical/visual
analogues of silence, rest, being-at-a-loss, reverie, bodily experience—are
important. And: Make things up! If you need a word or word-like device that
isn’t to hand, mock it up on the spot. But this is another long essay, and I’ve
already said so/too much. For now, otherwise, perhaps: See below on real fall
from pretend cliff and abstaining from A.B.C. language.

On Specificity
and Multitude: the “problem” of Occupy—

SDS & CM:The imagination of your
work seems also to be deeply integrated with the idea of negative capability
and to be driven by an ecological engagement with variance, diversity,
juxtaposition, spontaneity and the many. This reach toward a multivalent consciousness—toward
an “intense, unpredictable poetry” (Hillman) coupled with the inherent
difficulty in trying to define “ecopoetics” — reminds us of the complaints
issued against the Occupy Movement by the dominant media.

Brenda Hillman:Humans seem to love certainty.
The marketing culture, the corporate culture—they really love certainty. Sometimes
writers participate in this desire for certainty when they crave definitions
and packaging for something like Occupy or for literary concepts. i am not
bothered by the multivalent and chaotic conversations around a word like
“ecopoetics”—nor am i bothered by the notion that it may cease to be a useful
or an interesting term. The important thing is to have conversations around the
terms—whether it is “ecopoetics” or “wilderness” or “environment” or the
now-whipping boy, “nature.” Poor nature—such
a rich word, with so many Greek and Roman roots and now everyone is mad at it.
And here we are, fracking one kind of “nature” (the cruddy deep resistant
shale-oil) with another—water mixed with x, y and z.

SDS & CM:As the Occupy Movement grew and engaged a more diverse populace, the
demands of the movement justly diversified in response. That said, Occupy was
nailed by the media as having a “lack of focus”; it was criticized as a
movement that did not know what it wanted.

As
Evelyn Reilly asks so astutely ask in her essay “Environmental Dreamscapes and Ecopoetic Grief” while pondering the multiple forms of definition the term
‘ecopoetics’ has been subjected to: “do these calls for ‘everything’ risk being
‘nothing’?”

Furthermore,
do you think that Occupy changed the discourse on ecopoetics? And if so, how?

Brenda Hillman:Lack of focus is my
favorite flavor, so they came to the right place—ha ha! Occupy is essentially
anti-capitalist but not exclusively so. Most of the activists i know blame
toxic capitalism not only for the illness of humans but also for the death of
species and the discourse of ecopoetics often harks back to anti-capitalist
poetics movements like SF Renaissance poetry of Rexroth and so on.i think ecopoetics—inclusive and
formally inventive poetry redefining relationships to environments— was
probably helped by the work of Occupy—since neither is a protected, packaged
movement/concept-- and it helped with those poetic values i mentioned above:
indefiniteness and uncertainty and openness. i’ll say something more irreverent
here: Occupy was started by disillusionment and if it created more of it, that
may be a good thing; there is no reason at all for people, especially young
people, to believe in the unfair practices of the current economic system. The
current economic system is insane, is not good for most people and is
destroying the planet—so Occupy made the connections for sure. It’s not all disillusionment,
however; there are many hopeful things that came out of Occupy— truckers and
young people and homeless people and very far left people and libertarian
people got out into the streets, collectively, because they were disgusted.Many remained disgusted. We must not
let up our activism even though the movement dissipated. The concepts did not
dissipate and i believe the refusal-energy is alive.

Frances Richard: When Evelyn writes of “updated nature writing, ruined-landscape writing, over-earnest
science-inflected writing, call to arms writing,” I feel self-recognition. I’m
engaged in some ways with all these things. This makes me feel worried: is what
I’m doing too neatly codified, signed on to a preexisting trend or shtick? It’s
interesting, however, to observe myself turning recognition into discomfort so
speedily, since I’ve spent many years writing poems that, it seemed, belonged
to no school or discussion, that felt somewhat illegible even in the
communities in which I take part. After all, it is in some ways wonderful to
identify with a school or movement or bunch of people sharing vocabulary.

The hybrid forms, meditative premises, and urgent
social/sensorial investments tending to show up in work that gets called
“ecopoetic” make sense to me for multiple reasons, not least of which is that I
think artists should endeavor to deal with their times. Through the portal of
“eco-” these poetries attempt to grapple with geopolitical power; the material
world of technology and its debris; information saturation and speed in the
society of the spectacle; post-industrialism and post-colonialism; ideas of the
fragmented, dispersed self hanging on from Romanticism; ideas of a fragmented,
collaged and sampled culture hanging on from high Modernism. This is a lot.
It’s the lot we’ve got in this generation. But I don’t think it’s “everything.”
How could it be? Also, probably, art-making always risks being “nothing.”
Certainly in capitalist-reality this is true, because art risks being capitalist-worthless.

Do you think
that Occupy changed the discourse on ecopoetics? And if so, how?

[Frances Richard]: About
ecopoetics I don’t know specifically, and I don’t know more generally how or if
Occupy will sustain/continue to reinvent itself long enough to…. help us again
politically, let alone poetically. Eirik Steinhoff’s A Fiery Flying Roule and the People’s Library at Liberty Plaza
gladden(ed) me in that the powers I experience in poetry seem(ed) to be
spreading a little, sharing themselves with people who might not normally turn
to poetry as a wellspring. The huge demonstrations I was in in NYC were the
most intense and…. (real)…. that I’ve ever experienced, bold and fearsome, joyous,
not kidding. But then the demonstrations and encampments stopped. But then what
Occupy Sandy did in NYC last fall was incredible and beautiful. I hear of
amazing activism in Detroit. More power to the Rolling Jubilee. My undergrads
in art school have been (a little bit) radicalized. So: uncertain verb tenses
and parentheticals…

Individual Questions—

Question for Brenda Hillman

Sheila Davies Sumner: Seasonal
Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan, 2013), your new book of
poems, and last in a tetrology, seems like a sentient blueprint of that
element. Everything of fire belongs––its colors & light, combustions &
heat, and flash-points of volatility. A conflagration can happen within a
single poem; a subterranean burning might spread across several poems;
domesticated fire becomes urban or planetary or galactical, and also resides
within the “alchemist’s bowl” where “reality burns at different rates.” In
nearly unrepeatable patterns of diction, syntax, and punctuation, the movement
of your linguistic flame is unique and durable and precise in the way it
mirrors fire. Under this heat, the psychic life inside of words seems to pop
open and letters scatter everywhere, germinating like jack pine cones (Pinus banksiana
) –– again making an "intense unpredictable poetry" (the other part
of imaginative activism). In the poem, “When the Occupations Have Just Begun”,
a more humid affinity with heat comes up –– “obdurate cliffs drop into the sea
/ as tears pour from your heart’s / intricate oddity.” Crying moistens the
fire, adds an “extra kindling” of heartburn. There’s a chemistry of risk here
that reminds us of something else you’ve said: "One of the things
ecopoetics tries to do is reconfigure the poem so as to include some of the
endangered forms of thought." Would you talk about how the practice of
animating and reanimating letters might relate to this? Are words, as
constituents of thought, also endangered because of dead meanings or overuse?

______________

Brenda Hillman: First of all, thank you for your readership and for
those wonderful remarks. Like much of my other work, this book came out of a
twinning of defiance and love—especially the love i feel for existence, for
life on earth, for all of the invisible realms, and for a dream nature (pun
intended) that will keep the soul alive in time of war and economic struggle. i
am not sure where the physical features of the flaming letters came from except, i
think, from some of the more gnostic elements of the Judaic and Christian
traditions. It felt good to work with fire as it was inner, outer and very
flexible. In general, i want to carry archaic traditions forward in time and to
keep modernist and postmodernist practices very versatile with ancient myth as
well, with an emphasis on different kinds of material including the invisible
realms.i am very fond of this
idea of letters crossing the realms in Walter Benjamin and wanted to bring a
liveliness to that. The main thing i hoped to do in this book was to present to
its readers the idea that there is no limit to reality and that all realities
can coexist. i have always believed this, and it has always cheered me up. It
makes me happy if a little of this sense comes through in my poems.

Question for Frances Richard

Sheila Davies Sumner: Your
poems are shaped with "aural shadows". In The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012), there's a sort of drizzling of
typographic sound designs throughout the book that works to subdue harshness
while also amplifying conflict and bringing a restorative lexical delight. Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012) is
also rich in sound-sense and cognizance. You disperse the I/subject throughout
texts, in a kind of hide-and-seek poetics. There are structured associations
written into these "speed of dark" poems which track shifting images
and reveal their accumulative thought processes. In “Blush Alarm”: “People
experience memories in a brain / uninvented by movies”; and “blown like flowers
/ The dove going backward / Erasure takes a while / Put my tongue to taste the
grain of darkness / coming forward”. Syntax breakage and juxtaposition are
going on everywhere, at breathtaking speed, and seem to be foundational in both
of these books. In this vein, what happens to developing emotional states that
often need to slowly coalesce through continuity –– how much interruption can
they withstand (before a tipping point is reached)? We’ve noticed your ability
to work with the edge –– to exert a fine control in seemingly chaotic
environments. In the poem “Universally Accepted Definition”, you write of the
“instinct-injured”, and describe a visual fusion –– “from Chinese-painting fog,
egg-yolk sun sets / into ashen clouds––I know according / to this cliff.” How
do you navigate the cliff, the brink, without going over or into it?In this context, we think of the ego as humanity’s psychic instinct for survival;
not ego as an immense and central sun, but as one small
star –– possibly the north star –– among many. How does your north star
locate you? What is the responsibility of the word to
feeling?

______________

Frances Richard: I like these descriptions: “typographic drizzling”
(synaesthetic in haptic as well as aural terms)... “restorative lexical delight”
(the fantasy that writing and reading can repair damage at cellular and/or
geopolitical levels is outrageous, grandiose, patheticand at the same time,
we’ve all had our emotions, politics, epistemologies transformed by reading. (See
Occupy question.) Plus of course the sheer pleasure of reading when it soaks
into your body... “hide-and-seek poetics” (meaning and representation as hide-and-seek
or fort/da games)… “breakage as foundational” (from mitosis to cutting the umbilical
cord to Adamic fall to Lacanian mirror stage to the rhetoric of revolution to
how a foundation is in fact built, by first breaking ground.)

what happens to
developing emotional states that often need to slowly coalesce through
continuity –– how much interruption can they withstand (before a tipping point
is reached)? How do you navigate the cliff, the brink, without going over or
into it?

Great
question. For me this is a political/ethical as well as an emotional/psychological
issue. How is coherent meaning possible if all parameters are constantly in wild
quantum flux? Without baseline significance and identity that track over time
and can be relied on as given, the individual tips into aphasia or psychosis;
without some basis for shared belief or accepted premises, no instrumental communication—hence
no organization (“movement”) between people is possible; without terms in which
to name, relate, and differentiate, no discernment or judgment can be made, no
stance taken. On the other hand, fixed, unnuanced beliefs and uninterrupted
assumptions are usually a nightmare. There is no immutable line between the
radically, psychotically dispersed and the adamantly, fascistically hard. How
much interruption is the right amount? If we knew, wouldn’t we also know how to
make brilliant art; wise, compassionate, happy people; just and effective
societies; totally perspicacious judgments? As it is, you (I) just fail all the
time. Find the line by tripping over it, fall off the cliff constantly. You
navigate the cliff by going over it and surviving.

(In
Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel
paraphrases Winnicott’s object-relations theory: “The subject must destroy the
object, and the object must survive that destruction.” The cliff is intersubjective
paradox. You are yourself, not somebody else; but know that only by being in
relation to others. Including relation to the nonhuman—creaturely, geological, chemical,
topographical, meteorological, technological, etc. Or you navigate by creeping
to the edge of the abyss on your belly, peeking over, and wriggling away. Like
the scene in Lear where Edgar, as
Poor Tom, leads blinded Gloucester up to an imaginary cliff so he can commit
notional suicide and re-feel the value of being alive. Each element in this scene is compromised, untrustworthy—Edgar
disguised, Gloucester impaired, cliff pretend. But the despair is real and so,
therefore, is the retrieval from despair.)

In this
context, we think of the ego as humanity’s psychic instinct for survival; not
ego as an immense and central sun, but as one small star –– possibly the north
star –– among many. How does your north star locate you?

You
are, I think, getting at what I’m trying to articulate above about small ego as
failure-prone. The absurd in-between self, as opposed to armor-plated immense
and central sun. Less a North Star in all the purity and heroic road-to-freedom
that implies, and more the compass needle, jittering and yawing off course; not
a natural, extra-cultural entity but a piece of a built device; yet still
magnetized to something elementally bigger than itself (which would be… what?
The minerals embedded in the intersubjective or cooperatively eroded cliff… i.e.
small ego navigates via the experience of losing and re-finding itself in the
struggle to exchange meaning productively with other egos who are also
chronically getting lost or acting compromised—and/or with nonhuman living
things and forces that require us to be in relation but don’t exist for us or
speak our language.)

In
a poem, at least, I locate myself musically/sonically, and by how the lines
look on the page and sit in white space, and by a balance between direct,
discursive statement and vocabulary and syntax (and image) under pressure of
estrangement.

What is the
responsibility of the word to feeling?

I
don’t know, but that isn’t a good answer. What system of ethics or powers
determines this responsibility? To what extent are feelings in fact separable
from words or words from feelings, since both exist as brain-functions? None of
us grappling with this question on this blog are pre-verbal infants; we’re all
in the realm of language, and we don’t know what our feelings would be like if
language were stripped out of us. At the bottom of this distinction is the
chimera of mind/body split.

But
obviously word and feeling are not identical either; feelings resist
articulation all the time; ecstatic experience is defined partly by being
inimical to description, and so is traumatic experience. A certain kind of
writer would say (I project), “the responsibility is not to lie.” And that
would sound (to me) infuriating—as though one could judge confidently which utterances—and
intentionally artificed aesthetic utterances at that—measure up to some inner
state of feeling that is itself solid and stable enough to be gauged by an
officially ratified (by whom?) ruler. (See Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages. Wittgenstein also talks about a ruler
“made of very soft rubber.”) What would such an inner life be like? At the same
time, There is a responsibility not
to lie, if that means not to use flaccid, unconsidered language, language serving
unexamined, coercive power-relations or flattened out by
corporate-nationalistic fondling, language that plumps up narcissistic,
passive-consumerist ideas of self and denies fear, confusion, rapture, rupture,
selflessness, contradiction, hunger, nonsense. I remember, from grade-school,
the gross-out category of A.B.C. gum—“already been chewed.” In my notes-to-self
lexicon, there is a category of irresponsible language as A.B.C.—a warmish,
gray lump spit into your mouth from somewhere else along the line, used up, all
sweetness and freshness chewed out by advertising, by the hopelessness of
neoliberal political discourse, by emotional ignorance and bad attention. Poet’s
responsibility is not to valorize pre-chewed feelings given shape in pre-chewed
language.

(Flaw
in this metaphor is that the flavor of gum is essential-oil-of-advertising to
begin with.

This
points, perhaps, toward Conceptualist poetics and what Kenny Goldsmith calls
“uncreative writing,” admitting that in our language, and therefore in our articulable
feeling, we’re constantly already interpellated by hypercapital, and so the
task of the writer is to mouth the gum for all to see in its
shocking-pink/blue-raspberry relentlessness-banality-toxicity-comedy-bubbliciousness.
I have a lot of sympathy with this work. But it isn’t work I know how to make,
because, a) it also seems to me to flirt with another, inverted purity or
absoluteness, and b) I’m interested in the synaptic, libidinal, irrational,
inconsistent elements of language, what Kristeva calls the semiotic, that hum
inside and under symbolic language. The rhythm, including the ache, of the
chewing jaw, or the pattern of chemoreceptors firing in the taste buds, or how the
pink dye breaks down into molecules, and those molecules are part of your body
now.)

Bios—

Brenda Hillman has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press,
and EmPress; she is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan
University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009) and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013).
With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan,
2003). Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College of California where she
is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and
environmental justice and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. http://www.blueflowerarts.com/brenda-hillman.

Frances Richard is the author of Anarch.
(Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les
Figues Press, 2012) and See Through
(Four Way Books, 2003), as well as the chapbooks Shaved Code (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) and Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008). She
writes frequently about contemporary art and is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner
and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting
Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005). She has been a
visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and is the recipient
of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a research grant
from the Graham Foundation. Currently she teaches at the California College of
the Arts in San Francisco.

Sheila
Davies Sumner has an M.F.A. in Poetry
from St. Mary’s College of California. She has also written short stories which
appeared in Rampike, Alcatraz 3, and in the graphic-story magazine, one of one,
published by Burning Books. In addition, she has written and produced radio dramas,
commissioned by New American Radio, including What is the Matter in Amy
Glennon, which was nominated for the International Prix Futura Award. She is the Staff Writer for the Studio One Reading Series.Casey McAlduff is the curator of the Studio One Reading Series.